Politics and History

Is It Time to Ban the Democratic Party?

If things continue the way they’re going, it’s just a matter of time.

It is a political movement devouring itself.

All of a sudden America is confronted with American leftists abruptly striking out at their own history — pulling down statues of those who were the military leaders of a philosophical belief that is historically recorded and enshrined as the building block of the Democratic Party.

In a 2016 commencement address to City College in New York graduates, then-First Lady Michelle Obama said that “every single day” as First Lady “I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.” True enough.

But what the First Lady left out is that every day any Democrat in America wakes up they are the core of a political party that, like the physical White House, “was built by slaves.”

Back there in the stone age of 2008 I authored a piece in The American Spectator which was reprinted in the Wall Street Journal. In which there was a specific recounting of the Democratic Party’s construction as the Party of Race. A party that was built on the idea of racism.

Among the hard facts of party history cited were these:

Six party platforms from 1840-1860 that supported slavery.

Twenty Democratic Party platforms from 1868-1948 that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject.

The use of the Ku Klux Klan, which, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner, became “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease described the Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

The Democratic Party opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The 13th banned slavery. The 14th effectively overturned the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision (made by Democratic pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. The 15th gave black Americans the right to vote.

And so it went as the Democratic Party built itself politically on a culture of racism that is now once again overflowing in this sudden drive of 21st century leftists to deny the original identity politics that created them — and which is still the nuclear core of their ideological energy.

All of which raises the obvious question. If the statues birthed by Democratic Party orthodoxy must come down — and there is now a call to remove statues of prominent Democratic members of the House or Senate from the US Capitol building — should the political party that gave birth to those statues in the first place be the exception to the First Amendment — and banned and outlawed outright?

My answer? Of course not. The First Amendment should protect even a party built by racism and racists. But if Americans are not going to ban the Democrats — the political party that was built on the backs of black slaves and segregation? A party that continues to this very day by feeding off of identity politics — the grandchild of slavery and the child of segregation? Then at the very least the party must be held accountable for its legacy.

What does that mean at its logical conclusion? Should President Franklin Roosevelt’s statue on the Washington Mall be ripped out? FDR was the president who embodied the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s and well beyond after his death. He was also the president who appointed Ku Klux Klansman and Alabama Senator Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Black, a leading progressive of the day wrote this of FDR in a memo, as noted by author Bruce Bartlett in his telling book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Wrote Justice Black:

President Roosevelt, when I went up to lunch with him, told me there was no reason for my worrying about my having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said that some of his best friends and supporters he had in the state of Georgia were strong members of that organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization. The rumors and statements to the contrary are wrong.

Justice Black would later go on to author Korematsu v. United States — the infamous Supreme Court decision that imprisoned Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Will FDR’s Hyde Park home and presidential library now be burned to the ground?

Or perhaps the focus should be on demolishing the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington? The home base for the party built on the backs of black slaves and segregation? A number of times last year I asked when the Democratic Party was going to get around to apologizing for slavery in its platform. There was silence in response.

The American Left is in the process of eating itself alive even if today’s media — not to mention all those pullers-down of statues — don’t seem to recognize the logical end result of what they are doing.

And that’s before one even gets to the obvious if strictly ignored reality (by the liberal media) that all those would-be Nazis and Neo-Nazis out there in America are not “Right” — they are “Left.” The infamous German political party whose name and tactics these bigots, racists, and anti-Semites ape had its shorthand abbreviation of “Nazis” taken from their formal name — the German National Socialist Labor Party. A party that had as one of its slogans this: Geminate geht vor Eigennutz — “the commonweal ranks above private profit.” In other words, hardcore left-wing socialism. Suffice to say, Lincoln, Reagan, Kemp — or Trump — conservatives or Republicans they are not. And neither were those self-described Nazis and Neo-Nazis in the streets of Charlottesville.

So the question? If in fact the American Left is working its way through the monument legacy of racism in this country? Then the Democratic Party — the party of slavery, segregation, identity politics, and the obsession of judging by skin color which gave and gives life and breath to the American Left — is the biggest, baddest monument in all of American history.

One waits to see the moment when the Leftist activists toppling those statues of their philosophical ancestors realize they are demanding the political abolition of themselves.